Storyboards
The Magic Portal can do a storyboards The Chase Sequence The LEGO Canyon chase was a major part of the production. I shot several 100ft rolls of film on it, and each roll would take approximately three weeks to shoot, and I would have to wait one nerve wracking week for the film to come back from the lab in Victoria. A mere 3400 kilometres from my home town of Perth. A thousand grovelling, snivelling apologies for the absolutely woeful descriptions with each of these illustrations. This is, word for word, the actual descriptions. I was writing for what I imagined (as a ignorant and naive seventeen year old) starchy funding bureaucrats. Apart from a particularly pimply and dreadful phase in my early high school career, this is easily some of the worst writing I've ever inflicted on people. I keep it here for historical purposes only. Same reason as L is called LARRY - this is a last minute panic attack from yours truly thinking that those assessors would only respond favourably to "proper" characters with "proper" names. 046.jpg 047.jpg 048.jpg 049.jpg 050.jpg 051.jpg 052.jpg 053.jpg 054.jpg 055.jpg 056.jpg 057.jpg 058.jpg 059.jpg 060.jpg 061.jpg 062.jpg 063.jpg 070.jpg 071.jpg 072.jpg 073.jpg 074.jpg 075.jpg He was originally going to have much of the chase take place in an enclosed tunnel with roofing made from transparent coloured LEGO panels, like an enclosed freeway. L would scream through flashing zones of light and dark with it bearing down behind him. He dropped it because of a lack of a motor drive for the camera - I felt I couldn't get suitably low exposures with the filtered light without losing my precious depth of field. Shots 70 to 75 were dropped, then reinstated minus the tunnel 'cos they were simply too good to lose. The original tunnel concept was to be a transition to a medina of crooked LEGO back alleys, with a maze of arches, balconies, minerrets, stairs, overpasses and windows whipping past. No explanation or further mention would be made, but it was to be an excuse to really play around with foregrounds, backgrounds and strange spaces that you'd only notice if you went through it frame by frame. (Video rental was the new big thing back then. Old cult films and TV shows were being seriously rediscovered for the first time. Geeks were discovering the joys of stepping through Star Wars and ALIEN on their VCR's. And much of the Magic Portal was made knowing fully well that some people would have as much fun going through it frame by frame as straight.) Again, resources were super tight and I resorted to plain old blocky canyons again - quite simply, there just weren't enough architectural bits to make a worthwhile long shot. 076.jpg 077.jpg 078a.jpg 078b.jpg 079.jpg 080.jpg 081.jpg 082.jpg 083.jpg 084.jpg 085.jpg 086.jpg This the Magic Portal at its most Hitchcockian. Most of the storyboarding was executed during my first year film studies: He just bought Hitchcock by Truffaut, an excellent read that offered a pretty effective solution on how to cover all the action. The chase is taken from L's perspective, and seen through his biases and misconceptions too, especially those concerning ravenous, two headed Monsters. The audience is manipulated into seeing things a certain way with very little room to manoeuvre. It also crystallised something that seems blindlingly obvious to me these days: cinema is a language, like any other. All your elements, camera, sets, characters, lighting, editing, sound, grading, etc. are all expressions of that language in a multitude of different ways. The Magic Portal was my first big attempt to have a crack at expressing myself filmically. 087.jpg 088.jpg 089.jpg 090.jpg 091.jpg 092a.jpg 092b.jpg 093.jpg 094.jpg 095.jpg 096.jpg 097.jpg He spent days and days agonising on how to cover the train crash. He recall spending an entire long weekend at our holiday house doing nothing but pace around in circles trying to make some insane montage with about twenty odd seperate shots in it work. He had grandiose plans of shooting from every conceivable angle and heroically fusing it all together to dazzle the world. In the end, He came to my senses and chopped it right down to one or two major shots: shot 99 bascially becoming most of the sequence. Shot 93 was made part of the chase, and to make it a bit more interesting He had L crash through a closing railway barrier. Actually, shot 93 is actually incorrect on this board: the POV shot it should be facing screen right to screen left, not the way its drawn. 098.jpg 099a.jpg 099b.jpg 100a.jpg 100b.jpg 101.jpg Originally, the train was some surreal sliding thing, as abstract as the weird animating blocks L encounters at the first Gate or at best, an oddball semi trailer thing with rubber rimmed wheels. Happily, He received a thick fistfall of LEGO train tracks and train wheels from one of the LEGO donors, so the Train turned into a real one with tracks. 102a.jpg 102b.jpg 103.jpg 104.jpg 105.jpg 106.jpg Shot 102 was originally a pan that was quickly reduced to a static shot of L breaking down in front of us. At least the descriptions for shots 105 and 106 are more effective here. 107.jpg 108.jpg 109.jpg 110.jpg 111.jpg 112.jpg This was another sequence that I tossed and turned about, trying initially to cover every conceivable angle all at once in a furiously cut together action sequence. Once production got under way, it seemed to simplify itself with little effort and was stripped back to be a lot more succinct, with most of the action compressed into a single wide angled shot with L dominating the foreground. 113.jpg 114.jpg 115.jpg 116.jpg 117.jpg 118.jpg L and the MONSTER share quite an intimate moment together. The MONSTER was always a neutral character: its only monstrous in the LEGOnaut's eyes. It lives on the denizens of its own world, although, like a dog, it doesn't mind chasing a car or two. Or a shoe for that matter! 119.jpg 120.jpg 121a.jpg 121b.jpg 122.jpg 123.jpg Its interesting going through these old "final" storyboards, since its pretty clear the film evolved right throughout the shooting process. While animation is a process where you definitely should try to preplan and thrash out as much as you can before you start, there is still some evolution - especially if you're practically growing up with a long term production like this one. A lot of the angles here were shuffled around to suit production purposes. He have no idea how on earth he could have animated shot 119 as originally conceived: it was originally going to be a "hand held" whip pan from L's perspective looking at the tyre rolling into the Portal and then turning around to watch the monster drive overhead. He think this might have been a forlonly hopeful idea when I was experimenting with using an endoscope for the production. Shot 122 became a side shot, simply because (and I still quite can't work out how I didn't realize this at the time) the Monster is about double the width of the Magic Portal. Category:Behind the Scences